By the
time I was in the third grade, I knew I wanted to be a
writer. I loved to write stories. My third
grade teacher, Mrs. Laird, said I would make my living as
a writer some day and I believed her! But when I
was in the 10th grade, I was so impressed by the new
space race that I decided to become an engineer.
Eventually, I came back to writing. I guess you
could say that I wanted to be a NASA engineer but I had
to be a writer.

What subjects did you
like best in elementary school?

I
loved reading, spelling, and English most of all. I
also liked science a lot. I liked arithmetic, too,
but I had trouble with it. I read everything I
could. I loved the Hardy Boys mysteries and
the Bobbsey Twins adventures and even Nancy
Drew. I also remember reading Last of the
Mohicans when I was in the fourth grade and Huckleberry
Finn, too. I loved everything Mark Twain wrote.
I also liked science fiction a little. I read
mostly the works of Heinlein.

We
called the first through the sixth grade teachers in
Coalwood the "Great Six." They were not
only our teachers but in some cases had even taught our
parents. They knew us better than we knew ourselves!
The Great Six decided I would be a good writer when I
told them so many big stories! To make them happy,
I started writing. My first short story was about a
boy who helped the Roman warrior Horatio fight a battle
against invaders at a bridge. I was eight years old
at the time.

What subjects were
the most difficult for you in school?

As I
mentioned, I had trouble with arithmetic. I guess I
just got bored with it. I was good at my
multiplication tables and long division but I had trouble
concentrating on the problems. My teachers and my
fellow students carried me along, giving me extra help
when I faltered. When I got in the 10th grade and
decided to become an engineer and start building rockets,
math became much easier for me. I think it was
because I had a reason to learn it.

When did you get
interested in science and math?

It was
in the 10th grade after I'd seen Sputnik fly over
Coalwood. Five other boys and I decided to build
our own rockets. That was harder than we realized.
We had to learn a lot of things, engineering drawing,
strengths of materials, welding, machine work, and lots
of math. I had to learn calculus and differential
equations when I was having trouble with algebra!
Eventually, I taught myself this advanced math by using
my dad's self-help books.

Who were the "Rocket
Boys" and what did they accomplish?

The
Rocket Boys were a group of six teenagers in southern
West Virginia who were so excited when the Russians
launched Sputnik I in 1957 that they formed a club called
the Big Creek Missile Agency to learn how to build
rockets. Big Creek was the name of their high
school.

The
members of the BCMA were Homer "Sonny" Hickam (me),
Quentin Wilson, Roy Lee Cooke, O'Dell Carroll, Billy
Rose, and Sherman Siers. All of the boys except
Quentin were from Coalwood. Quentin was from
Bartley, a small coal camp a few miles away. All of
our fathers worked in the coalmines and most of us had
never traveled outside the state.

Starting
with no knowledge of how to build a rocket, we began to
try to learn all we could. At first, we failed
everything we tried. Gradually, we began to learn
and soon we were building rockets that were going over 1,000
feet high. At first, the people of Coalwood opposed
what we were doing because we made a lot of noise and
smoke but after awhile, most Coalwoodians began to help
us. The preacher in town preached a sermon that got
us our launch range, which we called Cape Coalwood.
Miss Freida Riley, our chemistry and physics teacher got
us a book, Principles of Guided Missile Design,
and also suggested we enter local science fairs to bring
honor to our school and town. After three years of
experimentation, we were able to fly a rocket over four
miles high. We entered the local science fairs, won
them, then went to the 1960 National Science Fair where
we won a gold medal. I wrote about the Rocket Boys
in my book Rocket Boys: A Memoir and also in a
follow-up book titled The Coalwood Way.

These
books were adapted into the movie October Sky.
October Sky is an anagram of Rocket Boys. Hollywood
felt that Rocket Boys would not be a good title
for a movie because it sounded like it was about
astronauts rather than coal miner's kids.

How did a bunch of
boys have the discipline to work together as a
team? Did you have adult supervision and direction
to pursue your hobby?

Except
for Quentin who was not from Coalwood, all the boys in
our club had known each other our entire lives. We
had started school together in the first grade, gone to
church together, been in the boy scouts together, and
played together in the mountains. We simply liked
each other and when one of us would get interested in
something, all would help. I was the one who first
got interested in rockets. The others joined in.
We had no adult supervision but we had lots of adult help.
The coalmine machinists volunteered their time to build
our rockets when they started to get really complex and
required expert machine work. Explosives experts
from the mine made suggestions on our propellants and
other mine company employees gave us materials. My
dad, the mine superintendent, helped by looking the other
way while this was all going on. My mother supplied
pots and pans and mixing utensils to make our propellants.
Our teachers were supportive, especially Miss Riley, by
fighting for us to get special classes and books.

When you wrote the
story of your childhood pals and their rockets, did you
ever expect that it would become a bestseller and a
Hollywood movie?

I
thought Rocket Boys might become a best-seller and
a movie even while I was writing it because there was
already a lot of interest from publishers and Hollywood.
This was based on a short article on the Rocket Boys that
I had written in Smithsonian's "Air & Space"
magazine. What I didn't anticipate was that the
book would spawn three sequels and be studied in over 400
schools and translated into eight languages! It was
a lot of fun to see Jake Gyllenhaal portray me on the big
screen but even more fun was to help out while the movie
was being made. I was on set much of the time as a
technical advisor. I didn't much like the changes
the screenplay writer made to my book but authors rarely
do. Hollywood never lets the truth get in the way of
their movies. It turned out to be a good movie but
I still think it would have been better if it would have
used a few more things from the book.

When the Apollo and
Soyuz spacecrafts docked in 1975, and the American
astronauts and Russian cosmonauts opened their hatches
and reached out and shook hands, were you watching?

I
didn't get to see Apollo and Soyuz dock or the handshake
but I did see it later, of course, on videotape. At
the time, I was on a scuba diving expedition in Honduras.
But I was glad we were cooperating in space. I was
never much afraid of the Russians even when they were our
enemy. I was taught, by my parents and teachers,
that our country was morally stronger than the Soviet
Union and in the end, we'd win the Cold War. The
space race to me was, and is, the movement of humanity
into the Solar System and has little to do with
geopolitics. Naturally, I wanted my country to be
the leader in space and I still do. There's no
other country in the world that has anywhere near the
economic power that we have to fund spaceflight.
Unfortunately, we do very little in space compared to
what we could do. If we wanted to, we could have
bases on the moon and Mars right now. Our political
leaders, however, don't want to do that right now.
Their priorities are elsewhere including fighting a very
important and sadly necessary war against terrorism.

What did you enjoy
most about working for NASA?

The
best thing about working for NASA was its people.
The engineers and scientists I worked with there were
outstanding and I learned so much from them. Of
course, I also loved working on space missions. I
helped design spacecraft, I trained astronauts to work in
space, and I traveled around the world to assist space
scientists. I decided to retire when I was 55 years
old for two reasons: I had 30 years in with the
federal government which I felt was long enough and also
because my writing career was really taking off. I
had to make a choice and I chose writing.

When you were working
for NASA, did you have time to write?

Even
while I was with NASA, I worked on my writing. I
worked after hours and on weekends. I free-lanced
to many magazines on a variety of topics and also wrote
my first book, Torpedo Junction, a history of the
U-boat battles along the American east coast during World
War II. I began writing for publication in 1973 and
worked hard to hone my writing skills. I studied
magazines and wrote articles that I felt would fit.
I never failed to place an article that I wrote even
though I was at first often rejected. I just stuck
with it, something I'd learned how to do in my Rocket
Boys days.

While
it's true most engineers don't write for publication, it
is important that engineers know how to write.
Getting your ideas down on paper is the first step to
getting funds to accomplish them. As for whether my
writing allows me to make a living, yes, very much so.
If you added up all that I ever made with the federal
government during 30 years, it still wouldn't come close
to the pay I get as a writer. But I still wouldn't
give anything for my great NASA career. It isn't
money that makes me happy. It's doing the work I
like to do. Since we don't have children, my wife
and I have used the extra money to set up scholarship
programs.

As a writer, how did
you learn to handle critique of your work especially when
you do not agree with the critic?

Poor
reviews of my work naturally sting but they represent but
one opinion and it doesn't take me more than a minute or
two before I've put them behind me. Fortunately,
I've never gotten very many poor reviews! As for
rejection, that is the writer's lot. When I started
out writing for publication, I tried to learn something
from each rejection. Ultimately, I began to
understand that it was necessary to tailor my articles to
the magazines. I read the magazines, noting the
style and the emphasis, came up with an idea, wrote a
dynamite query letter, and most of the time made a sale.

As an adult, have you
had any memorable moments that the young Homer Hickam
could never have dreamed would one day happen?

I met
astronaut Ed Lu years ago while on one of my wonderful
book tours in a Houston bookstore. I recall it was
for the Back to the Moon tour and he showed up in a
signing line, introduced himself, and we became buds.
When he was getting ready to go down to Kazakhstan to be
launched aboard a Soyuz to the International Space
Station, I sent him an e-mail which just caught him
practically as he was going out the door. He e-mailed
back and said he'd touch base with me in orbit. I
puzzled about that but sure enough, he did! He
called me on the phone! Can you imagine that?
We talked about his view (glorious), his work (hard but
satisfying), his time on-orbit (six months which he said
is going entirely too quickly) and dinosaur-hunting (he
wants to go). I also allowed him to speak to
another species, that being Maxx the cat. Maxx
meowed on cue (I tickled her) and Ed was, if not amused,
at least bemused. Of course our old kitty-angel Paco was
the very first cat to meow in space, way back in 1991,
but his meows were taped, not live. When we hung
up, I was struck by the thought that little Sonny Hickam
the Rocket Boy could have happily died and gone to heaven
if he'd had the chance to talk to an astronaut,
especially one in orbit! Old Sonny, that being me,
felt nearly the same way. Maxx was a bit
underwhelmed and promptly went back to sleep.

Did you ever want to
fly into space yourself? If you could design a
spacecraft to go anywhere, where would you want the
mission to go?

My
dream was to be like Wernher von Braun, a rocket
scientist, not an astronaut. When I first got
interested in space, there were no astronauts. Alan
Shepard and John Glenn first flew when I was in college.
I did not see myself as astronaut material at the time as
I have very poor eyesight and, anyway, I knew I would
first have to go to Vietnam after college. When I
came back from Vietnam, NASA was letting engineers go,
not hiring them. I had to go to work so I ended up
with the Army Missile Command. I didn't come on
board with NASA until 1981 when I was 38 years old.
So becoming an astronaut never fit in with my situation.

Would
I like to go into space? Absolutely! Space is
an interesting place and I'd like to experience it first-hand.
I would especially like to go to the moon. I think
we should go back to the moon and build an outpost and a
laboratory there. There is so much about it we
don't know and it's close enough we could go back within
a few years. As for designing a spacecraft that
could go anywhere, I am very interested in the Jupiter
moon Europa and the Saturn moon Titan. There could
be life on both those moons.

If you were going to
design a rocket to take human beings to Mars, what type
of propulsion system would you choose to use and why?

Can space travel (for
humans or robotic spacecraft) be made "safe" or
is space travel inherently dangerous?

Space
travel is best done rapidly as there are many hazards
there including long-term exposure to weightlessness and
radiation. These problems won't deter astronauts
from going but they do deserve very fast engines to get
them through the danger zones. Of course, I'd be
happy to go along.

What do you do in
your spare time? Do you have any hobbies?

Spare
time is hard to come by these days but I do find it.
I have been a scuba diver for many years and continue to
dive, usually near our winter home in the Virgin Islands.
I also run 5-6 miles a day to stay in shape. But my
latest passion is hunting dinosaurs! For the past
five years, I have spent a portion of my summers in
Montana working with the famous Dr. Jack Horner, the
paleontologist who consulted on all the Jurassic Park
movies. I've gotten to be pretty good at
identifying dinosaur bones and this year even found the
toe bone of a Tyrannosaurus-Rex. To see a picture
of that bone, go to http://www.homerhickam.com/newsletter6.htm and you will
see my summer newsletter with a photograph of me holding
a piece of a T-Rex!

What words of
encouragement do you have for the children reading this
interview if they dream about goals which are seemingly
out of reach for them?

The
most important thing to do is to first figure out what it
is you want to do in life. What is your
passion? Then, apply what I call the three P's of
success: Passion, planning, and perseverance. I
explain these in detail in my book We Are Not Afraid.
I think that there's nothing a person can't do if they
are willing to stand up and let the world know they want
to do it. After that, the next step is to put
together a plan (with the help of parents, teachers, and
friends), and then stick to it until it happens!

Do you have a
favorite quote that inspires you?

I like
what O'Dell said when we would get ready to launch our
rockets:

"A rocket won't
fly unless somebody lights the fuse!"

Although
he was talking about a rocket, it's good advice for
accomplishing anything. You've got to light that
fuse and get on with it!